One day after two tight Conference Championship games ended with the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers still standing, Google has released the latest ad in its #BestPhonesForever series titled “The Big Game.” These extremely popular commercials use stop motion animation to depict a friendship between the iPhone and the Pixel handsets. To give credit where credit is due, Google does promote the capabilities of its Pixel phones and will knock the iPhone, but in a way that fans of both phones love these ads.
It’s halftime at the Big Game between the iPhones and the Pixels and Coach iPhone (wearing the late Tom Landry’s old hat-Google it!) is trying to get his team fired up. “I know it feels like the momentum is shifting, but this game isn’t over yet.” One of the players on Team iPhone says, “But Coach, the other team keeps getting new AI features.” Another player says that the other team has “Circle to Search.” This is a feature that allows a Pixel user to circle something in a photo and get search results for that item.
Another player brings up the Pixel 8 Pro‘s Video Boost feature which sends a video to Google for enhanced processing using AI. The rest of the players are devastated by these AI features. “We’re doomed,” says one iPhone. But Coach iPhone doesn’t want to hear any of this. As inspirational football music plays in the background, the coach says, “That’s enough! Sure, Team Pixel got advanced AI to fix group photos and summarize recordings and reduce noise in videos. But it doesn’t matter what you got on the inside. It’s what’s on the outside that counts.”
The coach points out that the iPhone Pro models are lighter, have contoured edges, and “a different shaped charging port.” The coach goes on to say, “You don’t need fancy shmancy AI to edit photos and screen spam calls. FOCUS! This is our moment. Let’s get back out there. And you make sure they remember forever the night they played the team that dared to turn a switch into an Action Button.” The point being that while the Pixel 8 series made serious changes thanks to new AI features, Apple was happy with the small cosmetic changes it made on the iPhone 15 Pro models.
The ad ends when iPhone says to Pixel, “I, um, lost my playbook. Can I borrow yours?” There is a lot of meaning in this line. It implies that the iPhone has lost its way and that the Pixel, with the use of AI features, knows where it is going in the smartphone market. Actually, this past weekend we heard that iOS 18 is going to be a huge update for the iPhone with plenty of new AI capabilities and should include a huge improvement for Siri.
